Saturday, March 24, 2012

The Housemaid (Im Sang Soo, 2010)

Domestic
amuse

Im
Sang Soo's The Housemaid is a remake of Kim Ki-young's famed
1960 original, considered by many to be the greatest Korean film ever
made. Which makes this new film what, exactly...?

Am
traditionally suspicious of 'greatest ever' films, but Kim's black
and white melodrama is possibly one of the oddest, sexiest, most fun claimant to the
title--which makes its argument for the status more persuasive, in my
book. The original Housemaid plays like a breathless sex
thriller, a comprehensive catalogue of perversions running at
flip-book speed, with the occasional pause to allow a moment of
horror to sink in. Kim's camera wheels about, hurtles towards and
away from its actors, constantly reframing the mis-en-scene as the
characters struggle to reframe their predicament to their advantage
(basically a housemaid hired to help a pregnant wife who, in falling
in love with the husband, finds herself pregnant, and in competition
for control of the family).

Kim
borrows liberally from Hitchcock--at one point he has the housemaid
deliver a deadly glass of water and Kim's camera follows it closely,
the way Cary Grant's fatal glass of milk is delivered to Joan Fontaine in Suspicion (1941) (only Kim one-ups Hitchcock by
using water instead of milk--nothing purer, more innocuous than water, after
all). Kim also uses a massive staircase straight out of Psycho--only what am I talking about? The two came out the same
year; the striking similarity in size and framing between staircases
can only be a coincidence, or a case of cinematic zeitgeist. Right?
Right?

Kim
takes his homages only so far, though; he's a true original when it
comes to over-the-top acting, to maintaining a tone that teeters
between high drama and low comedy (the boundary strung tight with
sexual tension), to repeatedly framing the housemaid glowering behind glass
doors, a low-angled camera rushing at her, music
blaring in hysterical dismay (I keep thinking of Sadako, ancestor of
countless long-haired J-horror wraiths, from Hideo Nakata's Ringu
(1988); have we found Sadako's own ancestor? One wonders).
The film (based on the true-life case of a housemaid that poisoned
her employers' child) is a no-holds-barred, no-holes-barred assault
on the Korean bourgeoisie, which at this point in time held a
precarious position in South Korea.

Basically
willed into being by the Park Chung-hee dictatorship, South Koreans
were forced-marched into acquiring all the trappings of middle-class:
two-story houses, modern appliances, pianos
and--significantly--domestic helpers hired straight out of the
countryside. The people felt two ways about the situation; on one
side modernization is a good thing (Right? Right?); on the other,
they have a complete stranger in the house sleeping with them,
sharing and preparing their food, taking care of their young--is it
any wonder that they would feel anxious about these changes, and
that Kim's erotic horror thriller (a critical and commercial hit)
should strike such a sensitive nerve?

Im
Sang-soo's 2010 remake doesn't emerge from an equally turbulent
moment of history, and you can sense that it doesn't share the
original's demonic energy, or libido, or glee. Im has rethought the
situation to reflect the changing times: instead of a newly-minted
middle-class we have a fabulously wealthy upper class; instead of a
naïve country girl freshly trucked in from the country side we have
a somewhat nebulously conceived innocent who with her employer's
first advances finds a sense of giddy freedom that is, truth to tell,
fetching, if not downright charming. The camerawork has settled down
from hurtling rush to stately glide; the two-story house under
construction has blown up into a gigantic state-of-the-art mansion.
Gone are the horror-movie shock moments; instead we have more
explicit sex scenes which, while not bad, don't quite have the same
sense of transgressive heedlessness of the original.

The
characters' situations are reversed--the housemaid is more
victim than intruder, the family more malignancy than middle-class target. The film's best moments show the family's
machinations, how the wife finds out about the maid's infidelities,
how she and her mother plan to deal with the maid and her
pregnancy. The husband (Lee Jung-jae, a successful fashion model) is
a monster of selfishness and conceit; as explained by his wife, he
goes after what he wants and never expects to be disappointed. When
the maid bends down to fellate him for the first time, he lifts his
arms out in ecstatic triumph, as if he were Superman about to
receive Lois Lane's orally delivered blessing...

And
so it goes. Ultimately and unfortunately the film collapses into
another 'revenge of the social classes' melodrama when it promised to
be so much more: a stylish black comedy about how the upper classes
feed off of each other, with the hapless housemaid as their pawn. Im
is conscious of class distinctions, but doesn't seem to want to do
more than repeat cliches about said distinctions, instead of pushing
implications to their logical limits. The last thirty minutes loses
much of the film's stylish, hard-edged wit, and takes on a kind of
limp idealism--pretty much a description of one's experience of this
picture. Recommended, but only after seeing the yet unequalled
original.

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Philippine cinema has its share of gold and manure, artists and poseurs; because the average Filipino film costs a little over US$250,000 (in 2004 currency) and is usually shot on a stretch of about twenty shooting days (or less), the manure is often more odious than what passes for commercial filmmaking in Hollywood nowadays; on the other hand, because budget and schedule are often so small and tight, the rare gold nugget found seems all the more impressive, bordering perhaps on the miraculous. Thanks to those nuggets, I still believe in miracles.